Though poetry can be used to examine a number of topics, this author feels that it is especially illuminating when exploring war. On its surface, war is a ludicrous spectacle of human failings. The fact that countries allow disputes to be settled by a demonstration of each nation's ability to kill citizens of the other nation defies logic. In…

"Insults, lies, and whale blood" should be the title for the latest international dispute involving the icy waters of Antarctica. Although this placid and remote area of the world seems to be the last place one might expect to encounter an intense debate between opposing cultures, the dispute is creating a worldwide legal stir that…

Educators have been increasingly sensitized to the role of schools in developing students' cyberethics, cybercitizenship, and cybersafety, which have emerged as one of the most pressing and yet unexplored areas of education. The Department of Defense has identified challenges to cybersecurity infrastructure as a significant risk for the…

Social studies teachers have the principal responsibility for developing competent citizens who can reason together about the challenges of democratic life. Always complicated, informed reflective citizenship is even more difficult in an age of exploding information, often from sources whose credibility has not been subject to editorial review.…

The death of Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013, prompted a global outpouring of tributes and opened up important teachable moments for social studies educators. Some news commentators noted that effusive media coverage ran the risk of turning Mandela retrospectively into such a saintly figure as to airbrush away his humanity and his struggles.…

The October 2013 special issue of "Social Education" dealt with almost all AP social studies subjects, but omitted AP European History. This is one of the most fascinating AP subjects for students and teachers alike. In this article, the author shares his experiences since hewas given the responsibility of building his school's…

Waves of revolutionary actions beginning in late 2010 led to the downfall of dictatorial leaders who had been entrenched in the Arab world for decades. Everyday citizens used social media services to coordinate, communicate, expose, and respond to the oppressive forces that would crush pockets of resistance. The period known as the Arab Spring…

The story of Abraham Lincoln's reaction to meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe is well known. Supposedly, the president greeted the formidable author with, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" Although the two did meet in November 1862, there is no evidence that Lincoln said anything of the kind.…

The Common Core State Standards call for the increased presence of nonfiction in the school curriculum and for students' exposure to narratives characterized by textual complexity. At first glance, these recommendations may discourage classroom teachers from continuing the longstanding instructional practice of using historical fiction to…

Historical documentary film usually offers content in a format that students find more engaging than traditional historical texts. In the classroom, documentary film can be positioned within a historical thinking framework to study a broad concept like civil rights while facilitating students' source work and skill development. While social…

In this article, the authors demonstrate how a series of National Archives documents related to professional baseball players and the military draft can launch a lesson on the American home front during World War I, as the 100th anniversary approaches.

Sheet music, song lyrics, and audio recordings may not be the first primary sources that come to mind when considering ways to teach about changes brought about by technology during westward expansion, but these sources engage students in thought provoking ways. In this article the author presents a 1917 photograph of Mountain Chief, of the Piegan…

In this article, director of Educational Outreach at the Library of Congress Lee Ann Potter describes a classroom activity that focuses on an 1876 single-page circular published in Salem, Massachusetts about Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech. A. M. Bell's son, Alexander Graham Bell described "Visible Speech" as "a…

The recently-released "College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards" proposes an "inquiry arc" organized around developing questions and planning inquiries, applying disciplinary concepts and tools, evaluating sources and using evidence, and communicating conclusions and taking informed…

"One who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount," says a colorful proverb from an earlier time. This may be an apt saying for the situation facing the new head of the Federal Reserve, Janet L. Yellen, who takes over at a time when successive rounds of Fed policy have taken the central bank into uncharted territory. By historical standards,…